CHAIN

I've been playing wordle every day and posting the results on fedi. I'm going to see how long I can keep a winning streak going. Today is my 24th correct guess in a row. Here's today's results, for posterity

Wordle 466 4/6

🟨⬜⬜🟩⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🥳 

Since I'm going for longevity, I'm not playing on "hard" mode anymore. As long as I remain patient, there's no reason I should fail to guess any, unless it's a word I've just plain never heard of; and even if it is, I can usually get there through guesswork. Like a few days ago when the answer was "trice". Fortunately, I found TRI_E on my second guess, and from there it was just a matter of eliminating tribe, trike, trite, trine and then guessing other words until I landed on the real one. If it didn't prevent you from guessing words that aren't in the list, I probably wouldn't've gotten it. But it does, so I will play by the rules as they are presented to me. What I should've done, of course, is guess words that don't fit the pattern to narrow down possibilities for the missing letter. I could've gotten it on the fourth or fifth guess instead of the sixth. If I had tried "packs", I could've eliminated "tripe" and "trike" in one go, and because that word has a C, also stumbled on the correct answer. So that's what I'll try to do going forward.

I guess I'll try for a 365-day streak or play until Wordle goes behind a paywall, whichever happens first.

VIDEO

Since I talk about youtube a lot, I guess I should give a quick tutorial about using it without it turning into an algorithmic ad hellhole.

1. Install ublock origin. This is the most important step to using the internet in The Year Of Our Lord {YYYY}. Ads shit in your brain. Support your favorite video creators monetarily if you can. Don't feel bad for taking care of your mental health. Remember, the purpose of an ad is to create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

2. Never, ever, ever go to the front page of youtube. Never type youtube.com into your address bar. This is where your subscriptions live: https://youtube.com/feed/subscriptions. Bookmark that link. Cherish it. You won't see anything on that page you didn't sign up to see. I still see people lamenting like "I wish youtube would just show me all the videos from people I follow and nothing else." Well, that's exactly what that page is. I wish more people knew about it.

3. Delete and pause your youtube watch history. You can do this at https://myactivity.google.com/product/youtube. Make sure "Include the YouTube videos you watch" and "Include your searches on YouTube" are both set to "off". This will make it less likely that you'll be tricked into watching videos you don't want to watch.

4. Use theater mode. Click the button on the video player that looks like a plain rectangle. The sidebar on the right may contain videos from people you don't subscribe to, and using theater mode will make sure they stay below the video, out of sight.¹ You can also use fullscreen mode if you don't need to multitask.

5. Train yourself to ignore clickbait. Now that they can no longer show you "relevant" videos, the recommendations will be the broadest, dumbest, most egregiously fake clickbait you can imagine. Even after taking the above steps, there's no way to stop seeing recommended videos completely. They're still going to show up when you pause, and at the end of a video.² If you see a video thumbnail or title and think to yourself "that can't possibly be real", don't click the video to find out. It's not real. They're trying to trick you. Just click the back button or close the tab.

6. Advanced techniques

   • Every youtube channel has an associated RSS feed, but they don't make it easy to find. You can follow the instructions here to learn how to do it, then subscribe to the channels in an RSS reader so you never have a reason to visit the accursed website manually.
   • Some people have reported that yt-dlp still works as a way to download youtube videos or stream them in your media player. I haven't been able to get it to work in a long time, but it might be worth a shot.
   • You can use one of the invidious instances on this list to watch videos instead. Don't give any of these sites your login credentials: I stupidly gave one of them my google password so it could import my subscription list, and wasn't using an API. It intercepted my credentials and tried to login as me. Luckily it was blocked as a suspicious login attempt and I was able to change my password with no harm done. It makes me loathe to recommend it, but if you absolutely want to avoid youtube dot com at all costs, it works. Sometimes. It has to play the same whack-a-mole game as youtube-dl and yt-dlp because google continually changes things on the backend to foil third-party apps. That's why I no longer do any of this stuff, I just stick with 1-5 and the RSS method and I'm fine, but the third-party apps are there if you want to try them.³

ARSON

I typed the word "arson" on my phone, and it auto-corrected to "Carson". I tapped "Arson" in the recommended word list, but it was still capitalized. I wasn't gonna give it the proper noun treatment, but if android thinks it's that important, I guess Arson must be cool. Thanks for the tip, google!

OUIJA

Please contact my ghost via ouija board or whatever futuristic seance device is the most effective when we elect our 69th president, so I know whether I should say "nice".

KELLY